The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are running out of ways to spin the Josh Freeman mess in their favor.

What began in the offseason as a simple disagreement over a contract extension beyond this season -- and the just-as-simple decline in Freeman's productivity the last two seasons -- has turned poisonous. The poison, though, is coming almost exclusively from the Bucs toward Freeman, and as it worsens it seems they're the only ones who don't realize that they're the ones getting killed by it.

Short of some proof surfacing immediately that Freeman is the Satanic figure sending the organization to eternal damnation, as coach Greg Schiano and Co. seem to be portraying him, the Bucs and Schiano are going to take the fall they appear eager to set Freeman up to take. Schiano, remember, began the season on much more of a hot seat than his quarterback. There reportedly was a players-only meeting in training camp to discuss issues they had with the coach, who had alienated a lot of them in just one season.

Others around the NFL had been turned off by what they saw as a bullying nature, Yahoo Sports reported last year -- around the time of the victory-formation fiasco against the Giants and his condescending defense of it afterward.

Plus, there was the plausible theory that, good stats or bad, Freeman was not Schiano's guy -- he was his predecessor Raheem Morris', a rookie coach who rode with a rookie quarterback in 2009 and made it work until the bottom fell out in 2011 -- and Morris was fired.

Schiano was supposed to be the disciplinarian antidote to the too-permissive Morris. Yet while the 2012 record was better, Freeman's play was not -- and the three losses to start this season were a combination of bad offense and even worse overall team poise.

But somehow, after Schiano took Freeman's job away, things got worse -- with Sideline-Gate, Drug-Leak-Gate and now Meeting-Ban-Gate.

Looming over it all, meanwhile, is the planned divorce with Freeman, either by trade or release in the final year of the contract. Recent developments are showing every sign that the Bucs intend to break things off with him by assassinating his character and thus convincing the league, fans and the public that they were right in ditching him.

At the rate of this implosion, the Bucs will end up with a new quarterback and head coach next season.

As Wednesday came to a close, the NFL Players Association was still looking into the leak of Freeman's status in the league drug program; the original report on Freeman came Monday night. Even the NFL was displeased, as a spokesman told Bleacher Report: "The confidentiality provision of our drug program is critically important and a breach of the confidentiality by any party is a serious violation of our collectively bargained policy."

Meanwhile, the supposedly-unified locker room aligned against the now-deposed quarterback has cracked over the last two days. The most recent fissure came in a story on the MMQB website, which said Bucs players sense "an atmosphere of fear and distrust under the current regime."

On Wednesday, rookie Mike Glennon, the new starter, told NFL.com about Freeman: "He's been a great teammate and has always been there for me. His attitude toward me has not changed."

This came a day after Bucs tackle Donald Penn went on SiriusXM radio and defended Freeman: "This stuff that came out (Monday) and stuff like that, it's really like they're really trying to bring him down ... I know it's killing him, what's going on."

This all contradicts the narrative from just a week ago: that Schiano benching Freeman had the full support of his teammates, who had pushed to take away his captaincy and had chafed at his apparent chronic tardiness, unreliability and poor leadership. It explained everything -- including the disinterest in re-signing him.

Now every tale that comes out of the organization, anonymous or not, has to be taken with a grain of salt, or several pounds.

The tipping point was the report of Freeman and the NFL drug program. The denials and circuitous explanations from Schiano and general manager Mark Dominik aren't testing well. They're losing more of the public's benefit of the doubt with every utterance and every reported action.

Tuesday's Fox Sports report of Freeman being told to stay away from meetings -- and the suspicion that he was once again being set up to look bad and catch unwarranted blame -- are proof that the Bucs' management's word can't be trusted anymore.

And now, dots are being connected that weren't before. On the same day word got out that the union was checking into the possible confidentiality breach, it also filed a grievance against the Bucs over how they handled the MRSA problem with kicker Lawrence Tynes in the preseason.

The Bucs looked as if they were trying to get away with something underhanded on a key player ... again.

Whether Freeman is professional enough to be the Bucs' quarterback of the future, no longer is the foremost question around the organization.

That would be whether the Bucs are even trying to be a professional organization at all.